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What must we do to prevent widespread famine – the true effect of climate change?
We concluded in the first part of this article that current food production methods need to be more robust to combat this threat. Unfortunately, traditional farming methods may not keep up with the challenges that climate change presents worldwide. In the developed world this poses a serious concern, but the impact on the poorer underdeveloped world could have a devasting effect with entire communities being wiped out by famine.
Famine, as history dictates, leads to displaced communities, even nations – this ultimately results in concentrations of refugees ill equipped to care for themselves. Disease becomes rife with a real risk of pandemics in a time when we are seeing many medicines no longer being effective.
Less than one fifth of the earth’s land lies within 55°N and S. With the effects of climate change it will be necessary to turn to these cooler climates for agriculture to produce the world’s food supply. The yield from these smaller areas will have to be substantially increased to offset the challenges of crowding, restricted daylight and precipitation, not forgetting the conflict with existing land use.
Thinking about the space we need and the space we occupy will become a challenging necessity in daily life.
Having to maximise on minimal space to feed the world will naturally lead to the engineering of new crops to optimise them to their new environments, however, each benefit often has consequences. The likelihood that former natural defences to pests and disease will be compromised is high and even if this is not the case, the stressed environment of highly intensive farming would encourage such pests and disease to flourish.
The challenges of climate change are immense and the problems that need to be overcome to protect our agriculture needs addressing now.
Dealing with pests and diseases need to go hand in hand with any plan and advances in technology to help save our world as we know it today.
If you’ve got an idea you want to develop to help combat the effects of climate change, we have the expertise to meet and exceed the growing technological demands of Agritech. We work closely with all our clients to ensure they have all the support they need throughout the product development process.
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